User:Kent M Pitman

The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.

I graduated from MIT in 1981 with a B.S. in Philosophy and Linguistics.

I am a native English speaker. I learned Spanish in school. I taught myself Portuguese.

I participated as a technical contributor and Project Editor for subcommittee X3J13, which produced ANSI Common Lisp (X3.226/1994).

I participated as US International Representative to ISO SC22 WG16, and in that capacity served as Project Editor during the production of ISO/IEC 13816:1997(E), an international standard for the programming language ISLISP.

I have contributed to the R&D efforts for Macsyma at MIT and Symbolics Inc., the Gamma product at Schlumberger-Doll Research Center, the T dialect of Scheme at Yale, the Programmer's Apprentice at MIT, and the Knowledge Engineer's Assistant at the Open University, among others.

I have [numerous technical and non-technical publications]: some refereed conference papers, some university memos and working papers, and some magazine articles and web postings. The most well-known are [The Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS)] (a webbed version of ANSI Common Lisp) and [Another Way Out] (a site of parodies of the CBS daytime drama [The Young and the Restless]).

I am also noted for my public posts on the [newsgroup] for the Lisp family of programming languages, where I have sought to put the facts of history into a social and political context. It is my belief that a great deal of the history I've been a part of is not something that was destined by logic to occur, but rather was a product of luck, coincidence, personal bias, subjective analysis, and politics.

I have spent substantial time during my career using and developing the social, political, and technological aspects of various kinds of online virtual communities, from email to message boards to interactive communities, most notably MOO.

I am asked here to discuss my interests and yet to offer no essays. It is my considered opinion as one heavily experienced with the application of organizational rules in real-world settings that this kind of rule is ripe for selective enforcement and invites bias to be made hidden, so as to pass syntactic filtering, rather than out in the open. I won't here defend that claim since it would involve an essay, but I will merely state that it is a fact about me that I believe it to be both true and materially significant to understanding my identity. I therefore refer the motivated reader to consult [my personal web site].

I have studied Philosophy and Linguistics, and having participated actively in and around the Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, and Language Design communities throughout my career. Part of my interest is the useful, efficient, natural, and community-accessible codification of knowledge into words and symbols. My work on ANSI Common Lisp sought to present information in just such a manner. It contained a 60 (hardcopy) page glossary of terminology commonly used by practioners of the Lisp programming language, in the hope that exposing and documenting that terminology would cause it to be a tool for learning about the community rather than a barrier to entry. [That glossary] is available in webbed form as part of [The Common Lisp HyperSpec (CLHS)].

Beyond the issues of codifying language, I am also interested in assuring that the Lisp and Scheme programming languages, as well as many programming concepts in general, are correctly portrayed in the world at large, to include here. My programming experience is in a variety of programming languages, including but probably not limited to Lisp, Scheme, C++, ML, MuPAD, Java, JavaScript, C, SQL, PostScript, MOO, HyperTalk, Teco, TeX, Macsyma, EMycin, Amord, PL/1, Algol, Basic, Fortran, and assembly language for the DEC PDP-10, as well as various formal and informal scripting languages.